Tuesday, January 23, 2024

What I Did Yesterday-ish

Today marks the last day of the leave that I took to celebrate my birthday. I spent a large part of yesterday (birthday proper) just... walking about under air-conditioned settings. I had a wonderful lunch of fancy sushi at my favourite place, before heading down to Plaza Singapura to check out the Yamaha there (ended up buying a super long flute swab), before walking about Plaza Singapura itself where I found GameMartz which sold the Steam Deck (I didn't buy because I really don't play games on the move---I tend to read a hell lot more, hence the Eirian series, with the latest being Eirian-V).

I made my way to Esplanade after that, wondering on a whim to see if Kelvin was there in The Band World (he wasn't---Liyan was there, and I just went in and kaypoh-ed around the merchandise). I had tea-time Guinness with nachos out at Harry's@Esplanade Mall. The old library@esplanade was completely boarded off (as expected) due to its closure; near it was 《印映》, a visual arts exhibition by Hong Shu-ying that reflected upon 阿炳, the blind erhu player whose most famous piece was 《二泉映月》. Apparently he was also among the earliest to introduce 简谱 notation for writing down Chinese music, but this part is a little sketchy to me.

Before I started heading home, I caught Night Drives with ANNÉ running through their sound checks. The lead singer was Nicole ``Nikki'' Ann Chan, and while her stage dress was definitely eye-catching (white body-con Bardot-style with a really low back and high hemline, matched with white ankle boots), it was her voice that was the more captivating. Her lows had that smokey feel that is always wonderful to hear, and when she was singing high to the rapper (not a fan of, but that guy was decent for sure!), it was clear.

Very lovely. Too bad I didn't actually want to stay for their set at 1900hrs---I wanted to get my ass home before the home-going crowd started to flood the public transport.

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SimplyGo---a name that will forever be tainted with the infamy that came from a forced adoption that got hastily retracted roughly two weeks after it was first pushed through as the only way forward for public transport.

I won't go into the details of the whole debacle, except to raise the obvious question: what is the end-game here? Will EZ-link cards be phased out after all, but in a much quieter fashion by stopping any new supply and force-converting each and every expired EZ-link card over to SimplyGo? Will SimplyGo be updated to not suck (actually show the balance on the fare card with a similar performance profile as EZ-link)?

The announcement is bereft of all that, which makes me wonder deeply about the possibilities...

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In other news, I've finally made my way up the Altus Plateau, and have fought my way up to Mt. Gelmir in Elden Ring. It's definitely a much different feel from Limgrave, and damn the Death Blight status effect is horrible; the Scarlet Rot is nothing in comparison. Urgh.

Back in Minecraft, I finally added the top layer of the four round towers that are on the perimeter of my castle-build. I've also added the ``rammed earth walls'' to connect these towers. Soon I will start working on the habitable parts of the castle or something.

And I think that's about it for today. Till the next update.

Monday, January 22, 2024

Another Trip Round Ol'Sol

Woah, stupid o'clock! Also, damn I'm officially yet another year older! Frankly, apart from having some fancy sushi for lunch, I don't really have any other things planned for the rest of the day. The old standby is, of course, to find some bar/pub to sit at, and read some book.

Maybe I'd just put on a face mask and go for a walk out on Orchard Road. But thanks to the fifth COVID-19 vaccination (Spikevax this time), I'm on a strict ``no physical exertion for two weeks'' edict, which probably includes this walk as part of the prohibition.

I suppose an explanation is [sort of] in order. I had planned to take leave from 2024-01-19 till 2024-01-23 (inclusive) just to chill out and do whatever the hell I wanted as part of my birthday thingamajig. Then MOH was like ``dude, you're due for your fifth vaccination''. I don't know about you, but there has been some spikes of COVID-19 cases here and there over the past few months, and the last time I was hit with COVID-19 was back in September, which was more than three months away from well today. So I was definitely interested in taking the booster shot just as an insurance for both me and my two aged parents, especially since it was ``free''. The only problem was, when?

A long story made short meant that 2024-01-19 was the best available time. I'd do earlier, but there were no free slots on Saturdays (not taking any more ``unnecessary'' leave if I can help it), and doing it later will run into some seriously hard-to-deal with issues (special item in church, Chinese New Year proper, and quite a few work-related events that need my presence).

And so, my Friday morning was burnt.

My Friday afternoon went away as well when the music coordinator in church had to reschedule a work-together session for the special item that was supposed to happen on 2024-01-14. Again, Friday was the only free time, and so went the rest of the day. To be fair, not all of the afternoon was spent on working out the special item---due to the big rain, I ended up staying for another few more hours to chat.

Come Saturday, I was starting to nurse the usual lethargy from the booster jab, while having to consume brain power doing transcription of the recording of the work-together session that happened the previous day. Then there was rehearsals for TGCO in the evening.

Sunday, I was just dead. I had taken paracetamol for Friday and Saturday to sort of control the side effects, and I had been running on pure spite (a.k.a. ``too angry to be sick'') for the two days' worth of events. That led to the crash with me feeling both feverish and too drained of willpower to drag my carcass to do anything. I slept for nearly twelve hours, and felt much better after that.

And that's three out of my five days of break that was spent just pulling through the side effects of the vaccination, while still doing my best to keep up with the obligations and responsibilities. What a fucking mess...

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Previously, I talked about how I fixed up the tables in my personal website to have ``sticky'' headers. I also mentioned about how I had to sacrifice the borders for the header due to rendering bugs in the browsers (I'm too lazy to find and link to it: I hereby invoke ``trust me bro'').

Well, one of my subordinates found a workable solution for this (we needed to do something similar for a work item). The gist of the solution was to eschew the automatic border rendering and border-collapse: collapse;, and to manually handle the borders, specially drawing only the left and top borders for all cells, except for the bottom-most and the right-most, where they will also draw the bottom border and the right borders respectively.

It worked, in a way. It created the new caveat of not allowing any other border-related CSS styling for tables, to avoid fucking up the manually designated set up.

In my case, I had to change the orientation, drawing only the right and bottom borders instead.

``MT, why so contrary?''

Because my tables have togglable hidden columns. This means that the detection algorithm for the right most column (i.e. the last-child of the <tr> tag) will fail should that column be hidden. I had tried to use some other types of CSS-selectors to pick the last visible column through class exclusion and what-not, but nothing beat the simplicity of just changing the orientation.

And so, now the tables in my personal website have the full border treatment, be it the header cells, or the regular body cells.

Huzzah!

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AGDQ 2024 came and went. I watched nothing live, but that is to be expected. The VOD list on Reddit was always cool, and with it was a great way to catch up on the coolest speedruns that made it to the Big Stage.

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Anyway, it's late. I'm going to crash out. Till the next update.

Sunday, January 14, 2024

Soreness

Ah man... played the tenor part at my first church service with Davie, and I am absolutely sore. The soreness isn't from having to lug Davie and the bass clarinet stand that doubles up as my bass flute stand from home to church with a busted up left forearm while still carrying my usual gig backpack of Aurelia and Stella, as well as my own music stand.

The soreness is from the unfamiliarity of reading the bass clef for the tenor part and translating it to playing on Davie.

Let's face it. As a whole flutes are an entitled bunch the way saxophonists are---no matter how high or how low an instrument we are playing, we expect it to be transposed so that we can play it a la ``instrument key''. This means that notes that would really be in the bass clef when considered in concert pitch will be rewritten into the treble clef just so that it can be read and performed. This is true even in consort playing.

This is unlike the poor recorder player (and the !@#$% nonsense picked up by those who wanted write dizi music in staff notation) who is doomed to stare at the parts in concert pitch, and figure out how to play. This isn't too bad for the gang of `C'-recorders (Garklein, Soprano, Tenor, Great Bass, and Sub-great Bass), but is absolutely horrid for the `F'-recorders (Sopranino, Alto, Bass, Contrabass, and Sub-contrabass).

For the hymns, I could transcribe it off hand in LilyPond, but apart from the the obvious effort, I just think that I should develop the ability to transpose from any commonly seen clef right there in my head.

And thus came today's little experiment. I don't know why, but I picked a day where two thirds of the hymns had four to five flats in their key signature (A♭=major, and D♭-major), with only on that has a single sharp (G-major). That probably added to the soreness.

Well, that's that.

I don't really have much else I want to talk about for now, so till the next update.

Tuesday, January 02, 2024

First Grab Bag of 2024

(No, I did not write this at the time that this was published. I deliberately delayed the publication to ensure that the quick summary stood alone.)

So the first thing that was on my mind was the realisation and general thankfulness that space is as big as it was. I know that there's a common Internet saying that goes something like:
Born too late for the age of discovery; born too early for the age of space travel.
And to be fair, I used to think like that as well.

Until I actually took the time to sit down and contemplate about the underlying reality.

Space is stupendously large. It's stupendously large to the point that the fastest known object, the photon, still takes a fucking long-ass time to get places. Space is also expanding.

But space has some terrifying as fuck objects that can, as best as we can understand it, obliterate us in as instant as it gets. The only way in which we are safe enough to observe these objects, let alone have the time and wherewithal contemplate about them, is from the sole fact that we are also magnificently far away from them.

Yeah, I'll just be thankful that space is stupid big, and that we don't have a good way of travelling all that distance within a life-time. Considering the amount of stupidity that the average person has given access to technology (see the car, the aeroplane, the computer, the Internet, and the peace engineered from strong international collaboration to actually preserving said peace), I shudder to think what will happen should we ever have such a capability.

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In other news, Elden Ring was as frustrating as I thought it was, but paradoxically, it was also fairly fun. I suppose the ability to run through most dangers just to do sight-seeing is one of the plus points.

That, and the mindless grinding that one can do to farm enough runes other standard upgrade materials to ensure overwhelming power when going for boss fights. It's a FromSoftware game---I feel no guilt in being over-levelled to take on various big mobs and boss mobs. The world is gorgeous even though it is often quite twisted---there's that sense of forlorness without invoking the weird biomechanical style that is the speciality of H.R. Giger.

I think I have sunk quite a few hours in Elden Ring at this point, and I may switch over to something else just for variety. Maybe a bit of the new DLC for Vampire Survivors, which is still a damn fun game even after so long. HoloCure might be the best in breed, but that is technically a twin-stick auto-shooter, while Vampire Survivors is a single-stick auto-shooter, which means a different kind of fun.

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I binged-watch the second season of SPY×FAMILY. I liked it. Unlike in the first season, this time the focus is more on Yor's alter-ego than that of Loid's. There was little to no emphasis on Anya's antics in school, which is fine from a pacing perspective. I wonder how the third season (should it come, but let's be real---SPY×FAMILY is too popular to not have a third season, especially when the source materials isn't exhausted yet) will go, and more importantly, I wonder if SPY×FAMILY has an actual ending instead of going on f-o-r-e-v-e-r the way One Piece or DragonBall does.

On another tangent, after delaying for so long, I finally started on Parks and Recreation. I'm still somewhere in the middle of season 2, and while Amy Poehler's character of Leslie Knope can be quite cringeworthy at times, the series sort of started to grow on me. No idea why.

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In yet another tangent, I spent a couple of hours during stupid o'clock a couple of days ago updating all my Lilypond composition source files to 2.24.3. The astute would realise that Lilypond 2.24.3 has been out since 2023-11-19, so the natural question would be, why the delay?

Well, because the Cygwin version was only available rather recently. While the actual conversion was ``just'' an exercise of loading the relevant files into Frescobaldi and then running the conversion there, I needed the Cygwin version to make it scalable.

It's just much faster to go
find -type f -iname '*.ly' -print0 | xargs -0 convert-ly -e
followed by any manual adjustments needed (like fixing the format function to have #f as the second parameter) than to manually traverse the entire compositions directory and load each file by hand. It is also less error-prone.

Besides, I also have another Python script that allows me to auto-rebuild the output PDF just so that I can update the files available at my compositions page.

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And I think I'm done with what I want to say for now. Till the next update, and oh, have a happy and blessed 2024.

Monday, January 01, 2024

Quick Summary

So, a quick summary of what I had written in 2023:
  1. 1 poem posted here
  2. 52 essays/rants posted here
  3. 0 prose/stories posted here
  4. 1 NaNoWriMo winning entry available here
  5. 1 pieces of compositions/rearrangements posted here
And thus the grand total here is 55 articles, down from the 77 articles in 2022.

That's an average of 0.151 pieces of writing a day, compared to 0.211 last year.

2023 was a weird year. I lost a team member, gained a whole section's worth of subordinates, got a new team member, transited from solely being an engineer to a leader/manager-engineer (running appraisals and all the other crazy things asssociated with the managerial-class work), caught/recovered from COVID-19, completed my set of dizi, pulled the trigger to get Stella before the price increase (and before the master maker passed on due to age), started serving in the music ministry of PPCC with Aurelia/Stella, performed with the TGCO in a couple of performances with quite a few newbies, and a whole bunch of other things that I cannot remember precisely.

What else is there to say about 2023 in retrospect? Nothing much, surprisingly. I think I'm fast reaching the age/period of life where I just don't bother looking back any more, not because I'm some kind of visionary (I'm not), but more that the past is starting to become something that is just not worth looking back one. I mean, when we look back at the past, it is usually to reminisce about something that was from back then that made one feel all nice and fuzzy about.

But for me, I don't have much to look back into the past any more. The ``good times'' are long gone, and no thanks to the great time separation that has been humourously called ``before COVID'' and ``after COVID'', the ``good times'' feel even deeper in an era that bears almost not resemblence to who I am now.

The running theme that seems to be with me is that of isolation. Yes, I may be serving in the church, I may have a care group to work with, and yes I have may have made a couple of newer close friends as compared to before, but somehow I was always alone. Okay, Jesus is with me, but He doesn't talk back the way regular people do. It's kinda okay though; while I may be alone, but I'm never truly lonely, if you can understand the difference.

For those who cannot understand, I'm afraid that I have no other means of explaining it. It's like the crude but effective metaphor of ``I can teach you to take a dump, but in the end, you'll need to do it yourself to figure it out'' (a similar concept works for gaining enlightenment, no matter your predilection for beliefs).

``MT, are you then resigned to your fate of not having a significant other?''

Yeah, I suppose so, though I have not completely killed off the possibility by taking what I would call ``irreversible changes'', like reallocation of my budget that were originally set aside for prosaic things like the wedding ceremony, the joint spousal account and the like. Call me a hopeless romantic, but maybe a miracle may happen, though like all people who sort of understand miracles, I cannot see how one might occur if all I do during times when I'm not working, or at rehearsals, or serving in the music ministry, is to stay the hell at home and do whatever I want without leaving my room.

🤷‍♂️

Anyway, that's as much retrospection that I'm willing to allow myself for now. The year 2024 is upon us, and there is a lot to be done. Work-wise, we are starting to see some of the stuff that we need to deliver, and so there's that. Music-wise, we need to ramp up [a little] on our performances just so that we can rebuild the much decimated TGCO due to COVID and other life priorities of the members that got in the way.

As for my personal life side, may the Lord be merciful.

Amen.